By
Drew Hinshaw and Patrick McGroarty
 |
|
In
1990, three African states were democracies. In 1994, that number leapt to 18.
Today, it is only 19. Alex
Nabaum
|
Despite
two decades of elections and growth, democracy has stalled, militaries are
resurgent, and autocrats are in control.
On
the same November morning when Boko Haram seized yet another village in
Nigeria’s north, police in riot gear surrounded the country’s House of
Representatives in the capital city of Abuja. But they weren’t guarding the
country’s parliament against an assault by the notorious Islamist insurgency;
they were there to block a politician from casting his vote.
Nigeria’s Speaker of
the House, Aminu Tambuwal, had recently defected to the opposition—a risky move
in a government dominated by one party. A court had ruled that he could keep
his speaker’s chair, but police at the barricades outside said that he
couldn’t. They stopped his car at the gate.
Nigerian lawmakers
were scheduled to vote on whether to renew a bill that allows soldiers to
detain suspects without cause in areas threatened by Boko Haram’s gunmen. Mr.
Tambuwal expected to lead the legislative bloc opposed to this grant of
sweeping state powers. Instead, the police fired tear gas and effectively shut
down the Nigerian parliament.
Nigeria’s political
drama is just one example of a disquieting trend across the continent. Two decades
of elections and economic progress in Africa haven’t erased the vast power that
militaries have long wielded in many countries, large and small. In much of
Africa, in fact, the armed forces have gained influence in recent years as
battling Islamist terrorists has become a priority.
“There are signs of
the predatory nature of military rule” returning to Africa, said Larry Diamond,
director of Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule
of Law. “This is a calamity for a number of these countries.”
To friends of
democratic development, Africa’s 54 countries pose perhaps the world’s most
important test of whether representative institutions can flourish amid low
living standards and rapidly changing economies. Leaders from the U.S., Europe
and Latin America have visited the continent to promote open, politically
accountable government. They know that China, Africa’s biggest trading partner,
is offering a rival model in the form of market-powered autocracy.
For now, the advance
of democracy in Africa appears to have stalled. In 1990, just three of Africa’s
48 countries were electoral democracies, according to Freedom House, a
Washington-based pro-democracy advocacy group. By 1994, that number had leapt
to 18. Two decades later, only 19 qualify.
This disappointing
record raises difficult questions about the possibility of poor countries
becoming durable democracies. Several African states—Botswana and Zambia, for
instance—seem to be headed in that direction. Rising middle classes there are
demanding more accountability and transparency from their governments, and
public services are gradually improving.
But many more African
countries, such as Angola and Sudan, are resource-rich, single-party
autocracies that have consolidated their grip on power, thanks in part to high
oil prices and low-interest loans from China. Some political scientists hope
that a slowing Chinese economy—and dropping crude-oil prices—could
give a second wind to democracy in Africa, forcing closed regimes to hold
elections in return for Western loans.
But spreading
democracy isn’t as simple as dangling aid and applauding elections, democratization
experts say. Even hopeful cases like Ghana and Benin must confront long
histories of military rule woven into their political evolution.
In many African
countries, soldiers have run the show since the earliest days of colonialism.
In the late 1800s, Europeans recruited local men into new armies to help
conquer a vast continent. Throughout the imperial century that followed,
Europeans used those colonial brigades to repress the African lawyers, civil
servants and journalists who were agitating for independence.
After World War II,
Britain, France and other European empires withdrew. But the militaries of many
newly independent African states continued to suppress their own civil
societies. Africa weathered more than 60 coups between 1960 and 1990, according
to the African Development Bank. Some overturned election results that military
leaders found unpalatable; others promised to stamp out political corruption,
took over and became corrupt themselves.
Many of these regimes
relied on Cold War-era patronage from Washington or Moscow. Soviet patrons
often found themselves bankrupt after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, and
the U.S. lost interest in supporting corrupt regimes such as Zaire under Mobutu
Sese Seko.
In the post-Cold War
era, dozens of African countries tried to escape financial trouble by staging
elections in return for U.S. loans and aid. The soldiers who once lorded over
countries such as Ghana and Nigeria returned to their barracks. After the al
Qaeda attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, many African governments began to receive
military training from U.S. officials seeking new allies in their war on
Islamist terror.
Africa’s politics
have been relatively stable over the past decade, and African economies have
surged. Vast reserves of oil, gas and minerals helped to attract $56 billion in
foreign-direct investment in 2013, the U.N. says—triple the $18 billion that
arrived a decade earlier. Economic growth, almost flat 20 years ago, will reach
5% this year, according to the African Development Bank—a rate higher than any
region except Asia.
That growth has
empowered a new middle class. In Senegal, Uganda, Kenya and elsewhere,
cosmopolitan young consumers have rallied to demand Western-style democracy.
Political scientists had hoped that this rising constituency would convince
soldiers that they were better off reaping the benefits of economic advance
from the sidelines than standing in democracy’s way.
But it often hasn’t
worked out that way. Despite rapid economic growth, Africa’s civic institutions
remain weak, struggling to provide basic services. Public hospitals in West
Africa are fighting an uphill battle against Ebola. Child-protection agencies
are watching young constituents join Islamist rebellions in Nigeria and Kenya.
Against this backdrop
of weak state capacity, African armies stand out for the manpower and funding
they enjoy. They are also increasingly well organized: The U.S. trained some
52,000 African troops in 2013 alone, at a cost of $99 million. So when trouble
brews, African presidents and protesters alike often turn to the most capable
institution at their disposal.
“When you feel some
imminent danger, you call the military,” said Mulbah Morlu, a leader of
Liberia’s top opposition party. But his own country’s history shows the risks
of that approach. After Liberia’s 14-year civil war ended in 2003, the U.S.
paid security contractor DynCorp International, based in McLean, Va., to train
the country’s new, 2,000-person army. Other institutions like the health
ministry received scant attention.
The Ebola crisis has
exposed that gap. Some Liberian doctors abandoned their posts when the epidemic
exploded in June and July. The country’s health ministry struggled to track
individuals crisscrossing the country carrying the deadly virus. Frustrated,
President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf called in the military.
That was the wrong
move, Ms. Johnson Sirleaf now says. Instead of isolating individuals with the
virus, her soldiers quarantined whole neighborhoods—at one point firing shots
into a crowd and killing a teenage boy. That scared people elsewhere into
hiding their sick neighbors, and the virus spread exponentially.
“I did not know what
to do,” Ms. Johnson Sirleaf said last week.
“Capacity is always an issue with us.”
Embattled presidents
aren’t the only ones asking African armies for help. In some of Africa’s
poorest countries—Mali, Guinea, Niger—groups fighting for democracy say that
they are fine with the occasional military-led ouster of an elected leader, if
a coup is what it takes to speed the democratic process.
“Civil society, because
of its frustration, wants a transitional process,” says Alex Vines, an Africa
analyst at the London-based think tank Chatham House. “In the short term, a
military coup is seen as expedient.”
That is what happened
last month in Burkina Faso, a quiet democracy in turbulent West Africa. A
former army officer, Blaise Compaoré, had won four elections and governed for
27 years; the constitution banned him from a fifth run. When he tried to change
the constitution to seek one anyway, tens of thousands of protesters took to
the streets and set fire to government buildings, demanding that he leave the
constitution alone.
Amid the chaos, an
odd alliance formed: Protesters rallied behind Mr. Compaoré’s own security
detail. Officers seized power and
promised new elections within a year. The next morning, protesters thronged
back into the streets and started sweeping, a symbolic gesture meant to welcome
their new military rulers.
“It is we in civil
society that insisted the army come and restore order,” says Aristide Zongo,
executive director of the Burkinabé Association for Reducing Child Mortality.
“From my point of view, it’s quite acceptable.”
This isn’t how
democracy advocates had hoped that Africa would progress. In the 1990s,
activists argued that democracy would pave the way for development. Elections
would make African presidents accountable; those presidents would improve
governance and expand services; as governance improved, big companies would
flock to the continent.
But that virtuous
cycle hasn’t taken hold. Though the end of the Cold War did nudge many African
autocrats toward elections, businesses rushed in far faster than governance
improved. Today, blue-chip companies such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and General Electric Co. are expanding into countries
whose leaders have never faced a real electoral contest.
Elections have now
been held across the continent, but their credibility varies. In some
countries, rulers deploy state security forces to marginalize opposition
leaders. Less autocratic leaders foster loyalty by doling out state jobs and
other perks that would raise eyebrows even in many developing nations.
A whole generation of
elected leaders is now angling for more time in power. Next year, both Faure
Gnassingbé of Togo and Joseph Kabila of Congo are expected to seek third terms.
(Mr. Kabila will have to change Congo’s constitution to do so; Togo has no term
limits.) Both men inherited power from their fathers, who were ex-military
leaders.
Other African leaders
are even more entrenched. Angola’s president, José Eduardo dos Santos, is a
military commander who has used his country’s vast oil wealth to build a police
network that has helped to neutralize rivals for more than 30 years. In 2012,
his party won more than two-thirds of the vote in elections that observers
called deeply flawed.
Robert Mugabe, 90,
has ruled Zimbabwe since 1980. This week, he tightened his grip on power at a
party conference by sidelining perceived rivals and backing his 49-year-old
wife, Grace, for a senior party post. And former rebel commander Paul Kagame,
Rwanda’s president since 2000, is widely believed to be weighing a
constitutional amendment that would allow him to remain in power beyond his
second elected seven-year term, which is set to end in 2017. He says that he
will do what Rwandans ask of him.
The youth of the
continent’s population makes it harder for these autocrats to gauge the
political winds circling around them. Half of Africans are under 19. For many
of them, faster economic growth hasn’t translated into jobs and better living
standards, and they don’t necessarily identify with opposition leaders, who are
often as old as the presidents they seek to dislodge. Some view the military as
the best of a bad set of options.
For the U.S., this is
complicated terrain. Washington wants to build up Africa’s civil society but
also its armies. In 2009, during his first visit to the continent as president,
Barack Obama told Ghana’s parliament
that “Africa doesn’t need strongmen, it needs strong institutions.”
Yet Mr. Obama’s time in office has coincided with the rise of Islamist
insurgencies in Africa such as Boko Haram in Nigeria and al-Shabaab in Somalia.
Much U.S. effort has thus gone to training soldiers, not building health
ministries or electoral commissions.
The result has been
to create strong armies in weak states, said Sean McFate, a former DynCorp
official who trained soldiers in Burundi and Liberia. “If the most capable
institution is the military, in a crisis, that is what the country is going to
lean on, whether that is the appropriate tool or not,” he said.
The military remains
a swaggering presence in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country. On the
surface, the country is a flourishing democracy: Its economy has averaged 7%
growth annually during the four-year term of President Goodluck Jonathan, one
of the first elected Nigerian leaders who didn’t come from the military. But
Nigeria’s army—which led the country almost nonstop from 1966 to 1999—still
wields considerable power. A fifth of Nigeria’s nearly $30 billion budget goes
to the armed forces.
Still, the military
has repeatedly lost ground to Boko Haram—a fanatical sect that until
recently was armed with just bows, arrows and swords. Soldiers who complain
that they lack bullets and body armor have abandoned a swath of northeastern
Nigeria as large as Belgium. Meanwhile, their superiors have spent lavishly on
flashy equipment, including newly purchased Russian-made helicopters that have
crashed because Nigerian officers can’t communicate with the Ukrainian pilots
hired to fly them, said one security adviser.
Mr. Jonathan has
defended his army’s efforts. When Kashim Shettima, the governor of a state in
Boko Haram’s heartland, complained that the army was being gutted by
corruption, Mr. Jonathan threatened on television to remove the soldiers
guarding Mr. Shettima’s house, exposing him to attack by Boko Haram.
The military has
defended Mr. Jonathan, too. Soldiers have blocked opposition leaders from
landing at airports during their campaigns, and in June, soldiers confiscated
bundles of newspapers containing articles criticizing government corruption.
(The defense ministry later said that the newspapers were being used to sneak
terrorist supplies around the country.)
“Our soldiers are not
involved in politics,” said Nigeria’s military spokesman, Brig. Gen. Chris
Olukolade, who declined to comment on individual incidents. In a statement, Mr.
Jonathan’s office said: “It is absolutely wrong to accuse this administration
of repression. If anything, this administration has been most tolerant of
opposition.”
In October, Mr.
Tambuwal, the speaker of the house, broke ranks with Mr. Jonathan. The police
soon recalled his bodyguards. When they blocked his sedan from entering
Nigeria’s House of Representatives last month, lawmakers helped Mr. Tambuwal to
enter through a side gate. Police chased them down and shot tear gas into the
building’s lobby. By noon, the legislature of Africa’s largest democracy was
shut down.
Boko Haram spent the
day driving unchallenged into the remote village of Azaya Kura. Fighters killed
at least 45 people there, residents said, then slipped back into the woods.
—Matina Stevis in
Johannesburg contributed to this article.
Source:
http://www.wsj.com
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